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In honor of the holiday (and the fact that you’re not likely to be doing a lot of heavy web hosting reading today), we’re giving you a quick list of some ways you can save labor when creating your website, along with some labor-saving features of a business website from EarthLink.

Professional website design: The ultimate labor saving strategy for you – have someone else do it for you. With this professional design option, our web experts take care of everything needed to launch your website while you take care of your business. Ongoing, monthly website design and copywriting maintenance is also included to save you the labor for upkeep.

Website builder: The next best thing (in terms of labor) to having someone else create your website for you would be to use our super-simple, template-driven EasySiteWizard Pro website builder. Just pick a template that fits your business, enter some information about your business, and click to publish a good-looking 3-page site.

Location information: When your website prominently displays location information, perhaps including online maps and directions, you not only encourage visits to your store or office, you reduce the need to answer the phone to provide this information.

Hours: Questions about your business hours can drive calls and staffing needs. Offering this information online can cut phone labor.

Mobile website: Mobile websites that offer smartphone users the information they need without calling you extends the labor-saving benefits of the previous two bullets.

SEO: The more you are able to get your website to rank “organically” in the main Google or Bing search results, the less extra work you’re going to need to do to market your business. Our SEO tools help EarthLink Web Hosting customers optimize their websites for search engine rankings. Not only that, you can use them to submit your site to more than 60 online business directories and search engines all at once – saving you time and effort.

Social media: Save time promoting your business on social networks. EarthLink Web Hosting customers can easily manage multiple social media accounts from one simple interface and post to Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn simultaneously.

Email marketing: Announcer Pro reduces the time and effort needed to set up and track an email marketing campaign.

Whether you use social media simply to be social – to keep up with friends, post pictures, etc. – or to help market your business and engage your customer base, you’ll get more out of your experience if you know what a hashtag is and know how to properly use them. The good news: it’s quite simple.

How to Create a Hashtag

There are only two requirements for all hashtags:

They start with this symbol: # (it’s the number or pound sign that’s above the 3 on your computer keyboard).

They have no spaces at all in them. So, for example, #EarthLinkBusiness or #ITservices are valid hashtags, but # EarthLinkBusiness, #EarthLink Business, # ITservices or #IT services are not because of the spaces.

Hashtags can be a single word, multiple words, numbers, or words and numbers as long as they start with the # sign and have no spaces.

What are Hashtags For?

The most basic function of hashtags is to help categorize, organize, and connect with content. They were popularized on Twitter because they helped those tweeting reach a wider audience interested in their topics.

If I tweeted about a new cloud hosting service offered by EarthLink Business I’d probably add a #CloudHosting hashtag (and probably also #CloudComputing) to help categorize the tweet.

They are also sometimes used to specify a location. If, for example, I tweet a picture I’ve taken, I may add a hashtag for the location.

On Twitter, if you click on a hashtag or search for a hashtag, you’ll see all the recent tweets using that hashtag. For that reason, they can really help you find information and spread information about any topic.

They are also used to for events such as conventions, webinars, classes, online chats, Q&A sessions and other group discussions. Typically the event organizer or leader will create an official event hashtag; then all attendees can follow that hashtag to keep up with event information and discuss the event’s topic with each other. Even those not at the event can follow along this way.

Businesses are now often using hashtags for online promotions and contests. You may, for example, be asked to include the hashtag for a contest on Twitter to enter.

Hashtag Tips

How long? There is technically no character limit on a hashtag, but if you are using a hashtag on a social network like Twitter, the characters in the hashtag count towards the overall 140 character limit. So if you had a 120-character hashtag, you’d only have 20 left over for your post. It’s recommended that you keep your hashtags as short as possible.

How many? Similarly, there isn’t a rule about how many hashtags you can use in one Twitter post, but you should be mindful not to overuse them. On the one hand, research has shown that tweets that include hashtags typically get 2x the engagement compared to tweets without hashtags. But tweets with more than two hashtags show a 17% drop in engagement. So, try to limit your hashtags to one or two.

Where to put them? You can add a hashtag anywhere within a tweet – beginning, middle or end – but it’s most common to see them at the end.

Where to use them? Twitter is ground zero for hashtags, but they are now also used on Facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tumbler, Pinterest and Vine. Click the following links for hashtag help from Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

Capitalization or not? Capitalization doesn’t matter for hashtags. #EarthLinkBusiness and #earthlinkbusiness are considered the exact same hashtag. When using a multi-word hashtag, capitalization can help the readability (and therefore shareability) of the hashtag. So, when tweeting about our EarthLink Business SIP Trunking phone service, for example, we would typically format the hashtag as #SIPTrunking vs. #siptrunking.

Stay relevant! Make sure your hashtags relate to your posts. If not, it’s seen as a form of spam. Don’t drop a hashtag into your post because it’s popular unless it is relevant.

Don’t use for emphasis. This really is part of our advice to stay relevant but I’ll call it out separately because what makes hashtags confusing for many is the way some people are using them: to #make #a #point or #SHOUT. At their most confusing, hashtags are used almost like ALL CAPS or bold or italics to emphasize some random words within the post.

Test them. One way decide if a hashtag is a good one for your topic is to search for those hashtags and see what content comes up. If it’s totally random stuff or off topic from what you thought, it may not be a good hashtag for you. It is especially important to test event or contest related hashtags to make sure they are unique to your event. Otherwise, your event participants could be totally confused by unrelated posts.

Whether you have a large, multi-location business, a small local retail store, or you’re an individual service provider like a lawyer or accountant, you should at least be experimenting with social media.

Social media can be a great way for all kinds of businesses to connect with and engage customers and potential customers, to showcase your brand (even if it’s just your personal brand), to promote loyalty, and to distribute promotions. Along with your company website, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn offer you an additional online channel promote your business. But managing your business’s social media for multiple social networks can be a lot of work to keep up with.

The good news if you’re an EarthLink Web Hosting customer is that all of our hosting and ecommerce plans include a free tool, called SocialStream, to help simplify and streamline the process of managing your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn social networks from one easy-to-use social media dashboard.

Click the Connect button for each of the social networks you want to connect to your web hosting account (you will need to have signed up for the social networks first). If you ever want to disconnect a network, simply come back to this page and click Disconnect.

A new window will pop up for each network you select, asking you to allow Social Media Tracker to access your account. Click Authorize or Okay. (You may also need to sign in at the same time if you are not already signed in to the service.)

How to Post to Multiple Social Networks

If you are already in SocialStream, click the Communicate tab at the top of the page. If not, sign back into your Web Hosting Control Center and click the SocialStream icon and then the Communicate link.

Simply enter your post in the Add New Comment box (following the appropriate limits, such as 140 characters), select which networks you want to post to (or click the Select All button to post to all of them), and click Post Status.

You will see a confirmation message indicating your post was successful.

How to Track Your Social Media Posts

After you’ve started posting to your social networks, you’ll probably want to keep track of how they are working. SocialStream makes that simple, too.

If you are already in SocialStream, click the History tab at the top of the page. If not, sign back into your Web Hosting Control Center and click the SocialStream icon and then the History link.

Click the Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook icons to see information for one network at a time or click Show All.

You’ll see Posts, No. of Replies, Likes and the Time of the post. The most recent posts are on top.

Click the Follower Posts tab to see the users who are following your posts on your social networks and any replies to your posts.

Let us know how social media working for your business by leaving a comment below. Good luck!

Instagram vs. Vine

The buzz around the announcement wasn’t just because Instagram is popular – it is, with around 130 million monthly users – but because Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, was adding video to compete directly with the Vine app, which is owned by Twitter.

So it sets up two social media superpowers at war over the smartphones and eyeballs of millions of consumers. Like you.

The Vine comparison was also inevitable Vine is the early leader in social video sharing and because Video on Instagram would, like Vine, come with a short time limit. The popular Vine videos (or Vines) have just a six second max. The new Instagram videos come with a 15 second max.

How Do I Get It?

If you don’t already have an Instagram app, you can download it from either the iTunes App Store (for iPhones, iPads, and iPods) or the Google Play Store for Android devices. You can get Vine in both places as well. Both apps are free.

If you’ve already been using Instagram for photos, you’ll need to update the app to add the Video feature.

How Do I Use It?

Open the Instagram app and click the blue oval camera icon to access the camera on your mobile device. Tap on the smaller movie camera icon to the right of the photo icon to enter video mode. Then tap the large red movie camera icon to start and stop recording for up to 15 seconds total.

Instagram became famous for its filters (as well as it’s large and active community) and Video on Instagram carries on this tradition. There are 13 video filters built into the app. Instagram on iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 also has a video stabilization feature called Cinema, which is on by default. To turn the stabilization off, click the Cinema icon (looks like a camera with two sets of parentheses around it).

When you share your videos you’ll also be able to select your favorite scene from the video to be its cover image.

Comparing Videos for Instagram vs. Vine

The most important differences between the apps are probably video length, looping, filters, editing, and sharing.

As mentioned above, the most obvious and important difference between the two are the length of videos. Both are short, but Instagram gives you 2.5 times the length of Vine. Of course, both companies said they studied and tested the length issue and settled on the optimum (but curiously different) length.

Of course, there’s no one, universal, optimum video length. For quick, tweet-like videos (remember, Vine is owned by Twitter), six seconds may be plenty of time. That’s especially true when the content is really boring (or may get boring with any more time).

On the other hand, it can be very difficult to communicate in any detail, tell a story, or be instructional in six seconds. For that reason, many people will likely feel more comfortable with the extra nine seconds on Instagram.

(In many cases even 15 seconds is way too short, which is why the official Instagram video announcing the new Instagram video feature on the Instagram blog isn’t a 15-second Instagram video. It runs 69 seconds.)

Another obvious difference is looping. Videos from both apps play automatically (no click required). But Vines play over and over in a continuous loop; Instagram Videos stop after the first play. People seem split about looping: some like it, some don’t.

As noted above, Instagram is synonymous with photo filters and they’ve brought that expertise to their videos. That’s likely to appeal to Instagram’s huge base of photo filter users. Vines, on the other hand, are all about speed and immediacy, so they do not include filtering.

Aside from filters, Instagram gives you some ability to edit your video. Vine does not. In Instagram you can delete the last clip you’ve taken. So, if your 15-second video is comprised of a series of 2 – 4 second clips and your last one is a dud, you can delete it and try again.

Both apps let you share your short videos, but Instagram gives you more built-in options. Vine lets you share to Twitter (of course) and Facebook. Instagram adds Tumbler, Flickr, Foursquare, and Email to the sharing options.

Let us know if you use either app and what your experience has been. And if you’ve used both, tell us your preference by leaving a comment below.